The Challenge

A client, a corporate employee using a personal training budget, wanted to build genuine Design Thinking capability, both to bring back into her role and to explore entrepreneurial and side-hustle ambitions. She needed more than a single workshop: a structured programme that built from personal clarity (values, strengths, goals) through to practical business-design frameworks and a genuine testing and experimentation discipline.

The Outcome

Delivered the full 12-session programme as designed. The client’s underlying goal was skilling up ahead of maternity leave, so any side-hustle outcomes discussed during coaching remain unknown; programme delivery itself is the confirmed outcome, not a downstream career or business result.

The Approach

Opened with a structured discovery call covering career aspirations, side-hustle ambitions, existing design-thinking familiarity, and preferred learning style, before finalising the programme, not a generic curriculum applied blind. Designed and delivered a 12-session, three-stage coaching programme over Zoom and Miro: personal foundation work (Personal SWOT, Purpose/Ikigai Canvas, Action Board); core design-thinking and business frameworks (Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, the Business Aware Design Canvas by Matteo di Pascale and Sefirot, and Design Sprint methodology); and a genuine testing discipline (hypothesis, experiment, learn, decide, applied through real discovery and validation experiment techniques such as customer interviews and A/B testing). All frameworks and templates were kept accessible on Miro for ongoing reference beyond the programme itself.